SalsaShark said:
no one's debating that
but saying that no one would have produced a phone finger touch-screen only, considering there were already devices on the market that people were using without a pen, and that you know, its a phone, makes sense you use your thumb is rather ludicrous.
it was just feedback reaction. The Idea is always to comunicate the fastest and most comfortably, the less in the way the better. It was already evolving towards that and as you said Apple triggered it. Would it have taken longer, specially to be "the norm"? maybe, probably, but its hardly what i give Apple most credit for.
Funny that you say that, because it's exactly that that made the iPhone so amazing. The software that guided the touch experience.
I marvelled at several things about the multitouch screen. Firstly, yes, multitouch. I had never seen that before. I realise Apple may not have invented the
hardware, but the way that screen was implemented... the
software... was absolutely mind-blowing. The way it was 'smart' and avoided spurious touching. The way activations and taps worked and responded toy our touch. The swipes, and gestures. The near 1:1 nature of the movement of scrolling under your finger (the first time I encountered that was the level screen on Ouendan, but it felt so much better on the iPhone - even for ages after, people were still using buttons, scroll bars and other non-reactive touch scrolling). The physics in the scrolling - the inertia was just so natural. The super-smart touch keyboard that had type-checking (people often misunderstood it for spell-checking, but it was MORE than that - it changed hit-box sizes based on the word it thought you were typing). ALL this stuff made the UI feel so natural and comfortable to use.
And they never half-baked that part of the OS. They got it right and hit it out of the park from day one. You can bet any other evolution without Apple would have been slow and cumbersome getting to the same point.
On top of that, all the sensors initially seemed superfluous to me, such as the ambient light sensor, the proximity sensors, the accelerometers for orientation. I thought they were all just gimmicks. It wasn't until I got mine that I truly realised that every little detail was added to make the phone 'just work' with as little friction as possible. The light sensor helped for battery life, a huge deal to everyone. The proximity sensor wasn't even really noticed until some update or next model had a worse sensor, and people noticed THEN how important it really was. The accelerometers seemed like a huge gimmick, but were hugely influential on how the device was used.
It lacked a lot of stuff - but more important than what it didn't do, or was ever going to "eventually" be done by someone was how much the iPhone got right the very first day of announcement. That is worth marvelling.